According to Climate.NASA, “Global climate change has already had observable effects on the environment. Glaciers have shrunk, ice on rivers and lakes is breaking up earlier, plant and animal ranges have shifted and trees are flowering sooner.” These effects happening now were predicted years ago by climate change scientists.
Now, scientists are predicting that depending on our emissions of heat-trapping gasses, even greater effects are to come in the future. Temperatures will continue to rise, storms and droughts will increase, and hurricanes will become stronger than ever are just a few of these predictions.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that the global emissions outcome of current nationally stated mitigation ambitions as submitted under The Paris Agreement would “not limit global warming to 1.5°C, even if supplemented by very challenging increases in the scale and ambition of emissions reductions after 2030” and that “Avoiding overshoot and reliance on future large-scale deployment of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) can only be achieved if global CO2 emissions start to decline well before 2030.” Meaning, we are currently not on track to achieve our goal of simply limiting the global warming change of 1.5 degrees Celsius.
This indicates that the time to act is now and strong changes in how companies and businesses operate can become the forefront force in meeting these goals. We’ve reached a point in consumerism where the normal operation of business is catastrophic to the planet yet through greenwashing, we choose to only acknowledge the smaller issues such as replacing straws.
In reality, there needs to be a complete overhaul on how business is conducted if we even wish to stand a chance.
